Weaning & Your Emotions

Breastfeeding creates such a beautiful bond between a mother and baby.  It’s a natural process that provides the best nourishment for a growing child.  Sometimes it’s not always easy and many mothers want to give up.  When weaning starts, and we come to the end, it can sometimes be emotional for us as mothers. 

I am encouraging of my daughter to grow and become independent.  I love watching her through all the stages of crawling, pulling herself up, and soon walking.  I want to guide her through these exciting stages.  It’s interesting and sad to think about ending this special era of breastfeeding.

I’ve recently read this excerpt from the book What to expect: The Toddler Years and I think it’s very helpful regarding weaning and your emotions:

 

If you wait until your son decides he’s ready to graduate to a more grown-up source of liquid nourishment, you may have a very long wait ahead.  Though some babies and toddlers cut back on or discontinue breastfeeding on their own, usually near the end of the first year, others never do.  If you are ready to wean, then you should initiate the weaning process yourself. This is, after all, a two-way partnership and either party can end it at any time.

Watching a child move from one stage of development to another is always a bittersweet experience – filling you at once with pride (how grown up he is!) and with melancholy (he’ll never be a baby again!).  Some rites of passage evoke more mixed feelings than do others.  For many women, weaning their children from the breast is one of those.

Breastfeeding is an undeniably gratifying experience, but breastfeeding indefinitely because you’re not ready to give it up isn’t fair.  If your toddler wants to move on, follow his lead.  Don’t take his rejection of your breast personally.  He isn’t rejecting you, he’s rejecting the babyhood he’s outgrown, and taking another step toward independence.  As unsettling as that may be for you, it’s a step he must take. 

It’s likely that at first you will miss the physical closeness to your toddler that nursing provided.  But if you think about it, there are a host of other activities (hugging, cuddling, playing together, reading together before bed, and so on) that reproduce that closeness.  Enjoy those more frequently instead. 

Because the sadness you’re feeling may be intensified by the haywire hormonal changes that weaning can trigger, you should consider weaning gradually over a period of weeks or even months.  Give both your body and your mind plenty of time to recover and they eventually will.